GREENFIELD — Employees who work out of Western Massachusetts Electric Co.’s Greenfield service center and electric company management cannot seem to agree on how consolidating moving the service center to Hadley will affect customers in Franklin County.

While the more than 20 employees working out of Greenfield believe customers will be hurt, management says the most that response time would ever be delayed would be about an hour.

At least 14 of the more than 20 employees working out of Greenfield have signed a letter saying customers are “guaranteed” to experience longer response and outage times, but have not gotten specific about just how much longer that might be.

“The people of Franklin County need to know that a supervisor on call 24 hours a day cannot put wire back up on a pole or change a transformer, and the troubleshooter’s main responsibility is making a situation safe first, then calling a two-man (at least) crew to repair downed wires or fix a broken pole,” they said in the letter.

The employees, who belong to a union, also said that Franklin County is unique because it is so rural.

“There are a lot of miles of wire that may feed only one or two homes,” it said.

William Freeman, assistant business agent for Local 455 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said workers will have to travel from Greenfield and the surrounding area to pick up their trucks in Hadley only to have to return to Franklin County.

Freeman said at present if a truck is working on a site and workers find they need something from the service center, someone can run into the center on Shelburne Road and deliver it to the site.

“Now, they’ll have to run to Hadley and come back with it,” he said. “There’s potential for a lot of time on the road.”

Freeman said employees work a set number of hours each day, so an hour or more will be included in that time for traveling back and forth from Hadley.

“That’s an hour or more we aren’t working on problems,” he said.

Priscilla Ress, a spokeswoman for the company, said nothing will change what WMECO customers experience.

“The only thing that’s going to change is that workers will be leaving from Hadley instead of Greenfield,” said Ress.

She said that could add an hour to someone’s travel time if they have to travel from Millers Falls to Hadley and back to Franklin County when called in on a job, but it won’t change how the company delivers its service to customers.

“We’re certainly not talking about a lot of hours in delay time,” said Ress. “We’re definitely not talking days. There are no guarantees for anyone now, because we currently have a distributed workforce that attends to the most important problems first.”

Ress said, for instance, if two people living close to each other lose power and one is a life-threatening situation, that person could have power restored several hours before the other.

“People also have to realize that response time isn’t a matter of when the rubber hits the road,” she said. “It’s about a lot of other factors.”

Ress said there may be trees down or roads may be blocked or there may be a flood or mud in the road leading to a job, which could all increase response time, no matter where a truck is leaving from.

“Our employees aren’t all sitting in the Greenfield service center waiting to be called,” she said. “They are out doing jobs, so if a crew is in Ashfield and gets a call for Greenfield, the Greenfield customers are going to have to wait until the crew is finished in Ashfield. It has always been that way.”

Ress said the move will not be made before the end of 2014 and, in the meantime, the company plans to continue to listen to concerns and suggestions.

“Our first priorities are customer service and public safety and that’s not going to change,” she said.

But the company’s Greenfield employees disagree and are hoping that WMECO customers, individuals and businesses, will contact their selectmen or town councilors, fire chiefs, police chiefs, state representatives, and senators to discuss the matter and let them know that longer outage times are imminent and not acceptable.

The employees are worried that WMECO, which is part of Northeast Utilities, which has merged with NSTAR, is more concerned with policy and saving money than it is with customer service.

They said that though the company said consolidating work centers will not mean a hit to customer service, it is not true.

“Far from it,” they said in the letter.

“All of our Greenfield employees live in Franklin County and are between five and 20 minutes from their bucket trucks right now,” employees said.

They said they have always been able to provide good, quick, reliable service to residents and businesses of the county and don’t feel that will continue if the move is made to Hadley.

“A move to house all the bucket trucks in Hadley makes no sense at all,” they said. “To be the only county in Western Massachusetts without a WMECO presence would be a slap in the face to residents and businesses.”

Those who signed the letter are linemen, electricians, clerks, garage mechanics and field technicians.

Freeman said there is also a clause in employees’ contracts that says they must live within 30 minutes of a service center.

“What is that going to mean for us?” he said.

Ress said any contract negotiations take place corroboratively between the company and the union.

A spokesman for the state Department of Public Utilities could not be reached at press time, so it is unclear whether it will have a say in whether WMECO moves its service center.

i think it's stupid to move. if they are working in ashfield and need supplies for the greenfield job they will have to go down to hadley and then come back up when they could just get whatever they need here in town. dumb.